My God! Are you THAT biased? "All they did was start a marketing snowball" Congrats for pointing that out. That's no 'small' accomplishment as you're trying to pass it off as. All of the things you mentioned, you try to pass them off as small achievements that anyone could do. They're all great achievements that ONLY Microsoft managed to accomplish. And you try to say that they're not smart for that? Sure there was SOME luck involved, but why can't you just admit they Bill Gates is a freakin genius?

See? They're VERY good at marketing. Their software ranges from average to completely unusable, but that doesn't really matter much from the marketing point of view. Sad but true.

When I read statmeents like this, I know it's from someone who has never used anything but Microsoft products. If you've ever used other vendors' software (especially in software that costs more than cars), you'd really be praising them for releasing software that's top-of-the-line.

Seriously, what MS product is completely unusable? I can't think of a single product. I can think of quite a few products that are best-of-class. Office 2003 ... lightyears ahead of anything else out there. Visual Studio ... nothing comes even close.

Sure, there are lots of products that aren't the best (Source Safe) but what do you expect for the cheap price you're paying.

Most people simply hate Microsoft because they're big. They eventually stop caring about why they hate Microsoft and decide to call Microsoft 'stupid' and tell others that they hate Microsoft because it's products suck. I've learned to avoid questioning these people about that becuase eventually their argument turns to "n00b, microsoft = teh suck".

When I read statmeents like this, I know it's from someone who has
never used anything but Microsoft products. If you've ever used other
vendors' software (especially in software that costs more than cars),
you'd really be praising them for releasing software that's
top-of-the-line.

Wrong, actually. I don't use their products on a day to day basis at
all. I do occasionally do development work with their products.

Seriously, what MS product is completely unusable? I can't think
of a single product. I can think of quite a few products that are
best-of-class. Office 2003 ... lightyears ahead of anything else
out there. Visual Studio ... nothing comes even close.

Office 2003? OpenOffice with a talking paperclip, as far as I can see.

Office 2003? OpenOffice with a talking paperclip, as far as I can see.

The free office sweets are comparable to Microsoft Works. At that level, there's little difference between any word processor suite. But there's a whole other layer of stuff on top of word processing that Office is all about. Mostly useless for home user, but when yo uset it up for your business, it's absolutely incredible; there's no way you could even come close to that withouta team of C++ programmers to customize the open office.

See? They're VERY good at marketing. Their software ranges from average
to completely unusable, but that doesn't really matter much from the
marketing point of view. Sad but true.

Right. And the state of Earth's environment doesn't mean much from the
global industry's point of view. We can't blame anyone in particular
for that. But the current state of IT is largely the fault of one
company, and that's Microsoft. If you like things the way they are,
fine. I don't. Period.

Office 2003? OpenOffice with a talking paperclip, as far as I can see.

The free office sweets are comparable to Microsoft Works. At that
level, there's little difference between any word processor suite. But
there's a whole other layer of stuff on top of word processing that
Office is all about. Mostly useless for home user, but when yo uset it
up for your business, it's absolutely incredible; there's no way you
could even come close to that withouta team of C++ programmers to
customize the open office.

Hmm, I'm guessing you're talking about Access. Personally, I'd feel
that no-one should ever use Access for anything serious, given that the
databases tend to randomly self-destruct after a while.

The only thing I personally don't like about Microsoft products is that they keep feeling the need to add new useless stuff to them, and intergrate all of the together. I still do with word what I did with WP51 years ago. It is no longer a Word Processor, it's closer to one of those old DTP packages from the late 80's.

I prefer to use WordPad for writing documents, it's smaller, faster and gosh, everyone with Windows can read the resulting document. Unlike ppl who send out Excel and Word documents in mail and expect my father to be able to read them on him home computer wihtout the expensive MS Office on it (and with no room for it either [:P]).

Okay. That's better. Now, please, can you point me at an innovative product of Microsoft's?

Simon

I do think that Microsoft has some little innovations.

For example, just as someone mentioned, the use of (Word)Basic as a
macro language. WordBasic later become VBA, which essentially controls
all aspects of the MS Office applications. Of course, the underlying
work is done by COM/OLE (which I think is another good technology). But
I think allowing the programmer to control any Office applications
through VBA and COM/OLE is truely innovative.

Also, OLE allows one embed document into another different type
document, which I think it is innovative too. Double click the
Excel spreadsheet in a Word document then you can edit it, don't you
think it's creative? I don't know if WordPerfect or Lotus developers in
those years have ever thought this or not.

When we talk Windows 98, do you think that intergating IE into the OS
is innovative? I mean it introduced Web presentation into normal
application (ok, we shouldn't think too much about the buggy IE engine,
but if you can replace it with a faster and securier Mozilla engine,
would you do that?). Think about CHM (help document,ebook), HTA (local
web style application) or Active Desktop (hey, Dashboard in MacOSX?). I
think they are innovative, isn't it?

Also, OLE allows one embed document into another different type
document, which I think it is innovative too. Double click the
Excel spreadsheet in a Word document then you can edit it, don't you
think it's creative? I don't know if WordPerfect or Lotus developers in
those years have ever thought this or not.

If that's an innovation, then it's a stupid one. You won't believe how
many people fuck up by taking their composite document to a different
machine that only has Word installed (and not Excel), or even worse,
it has a totally different Office suite - there are quite a few, you
know. And then they can't understand why their embedded charts or
whatever have vanished.

Some cool ideas work, some don't. Nothings beats experience, if you ask me.

If that's an innovation, then it's a stupid one. You won't believe how
many people fuck up by taking their composite document to a different
machine that only has Word installed (and not Excel), or even worse,
it has a totally different Office suite - there are quite a few, you
know. And then they can't understand why their embedded charts or
whatever have vanished.

Some cool ideas work, some don't. Nothings beats experience, if you ask me.

There will always be problems when people move data from one system to
another system, if that other system doesn't support all the data
formats. It's a bit like posting on [i]this[/i] forum using FireFox,
since you know that this forum actually only works well with IE. If
you're lucky, you still manage to get a reasonable result...

The problem however, is that these days we have to deal with smart
data. Or actually, with objects. We have data and it demands to be
processed in a certain way. For this processing you need the proper
tools. OLE was a good solution back in those days but nowadays we have
better solutions for this. XML, for example. With XML you have a single
file containing your data but also information about your data. This
allows you to process this data in some way. And of course you can
process it in many different ways these days.

However, OLE is how old exactly? 12 years? More? Darnit, I was probably
6 or 7 when OLE was finally produced. And in those days, computers were
slow and expensive and something like XML would probably take hours
before the system could process it. Even worse, an XML file of 1 MB
would probably not even fit in your internal memory, because someone
thought 640 KB was more than enough. Back then, OLE seemed to be a good
solution. Nowadays we have so many resources, it's easy to just waste
them on huge data formats. Who cares that XML is so extremely bloated
anyways. Our computers have enough memory and disk space to handle it
all nicely.

i think microsoft is perty tyte. monzilla sucks i dont like it and ill never use it. i just dont like it period. have i used it? yes. whats that? where did i use monzilla firebox? in school when i use to go. and macintosh computers really suck and r poorly designed and the makers didnt have any ball um i mean brains. + u can only play games like wc3 and ut but thats about it of the ok games. .. internet explorer beats all other browsers and only silly ppl use monzilla because of the fear of viruses coming thru the doors. not to mention spyware and uhh trojan horse[:)]

i think microsoft is perty tyte.
monzilla sucks i dont like it and ill never use it. i just dont like it
period. have i used it? yes. whats that? where did i use monzilla
firebox? in school when i use to go. and macintosh
computers really suck and r poorly designed and the makers
didnt have any ball um i mean brains. + u can only play games like
wc3 and ut but thats about it of the ok games. .. internet explorer
beats all other browsers and only silly ppl use monzilla because of the
fear of viruses coming thru the doors. not to mention spyware and
uhh trojan horse[:)]

[co]=[Y]
[*]=favorites
[sn]=56k [B]=beer!

I can only hope this is just a sick sad joke. if it is, I didn't laugh.

i think microsoft is perty tyte. monzilla sucks i dont like it and ill never use it. i just dont like it period. have i used it? yes. whats that? where did i use monzilla firebox? in school when i use to go. and macintosh computers really suck and r poorly designed and the makers didnt have any ball um i mean brains. + u can only play games like wc3 and ut but thats about it of the ok games. .. internet explorer beats all other browsers and only silly ppl use monzilla because of the fear of viruses coming thru the doors. not to mention spyware and uhh trojan horse[:)]

[co]=[Y] [*]=favorites [sn]=56k [B]=beer!

I can only hope this is just a sick sad joke. if it is, I didn't laugh.

Also, OLE allows one embed document into another different type
document, which I think it is innovative too. Double click the
Excel spreadsheet in a Word document then you can edit it, don't you
think it's creative? I don't know if WordPerfect or Lotus developers in
those years have ever thought this or not.

Let's assume you are a freelancer who has to write one or two invoices
per month; for some reasons, you do not use a special program for that,
but simply use your word processor.

Obviously, you do not want to do the calculations by hand, but let the computer calculate the totals.

In MS-Word, you probable embed an Excel sheet into your word doc (with all the overhead).

WordPerfect (as well as OOo writer and TextMaker) is clever enough to
do the basic calculations required for an invoice within the text
processor. Yes. Most of all cases where MS Word users use OLE to embed
Excel into Word, can be solved with the built-in features of many other
text processors. For the remaining 5%, most other text processors
support OLE as well.

> I do think that Microsoft has some little innovations. Sure, one or two. > For example, just as someone mentioned, the use of (Word)Basic as a macro language. That would have been me > WordBasic later become VBA, which essentially controls > all aspects of the MS Office applications. Yes. And this is not particularly innovative. At the time, other office suites also had pervasive macros. And even if MS had been first, the step they took was very obvious. What Microsoft had, and fucked up royally, was OLE and COM. If they had really wanted to inovate, they would have provided VBA with OLE and COM as an OS-level service, and you would have been able to embed your Excel spreadsheet in your WordPerfect document, for example. Of course, that would have been counterproductive to the main work of making sure MS were the only people delivering software in the markets they were involved in, so...

COM is an OS level service. It is implemented in oleaut32.dll, is available to any application, and has always been very well documented by Microsoft (in the Platform SDK, not the Office SDK). If WordPerfect couldn't embed an Excel spreadsheet, it was because the guys at WordPerfect didn't bother to implement OLE/COM.

See? They're VERY good at marketing. Their software ranges from average to completely unusable, but that doesn't really matter much from the marketing point of view. Sad but true.

When I read statmeents like this, I know it's from someone who has never used anything but Microsoft products. If you've ever used other vendors' software (especially in software that costs more than cars), you'd really be praising them for releasing software that's top-of-the-line.

Seriously, what MS product is completely unusable? I can't think of a single product. I can think of quite a few products that are best-of-class. Office 2003 ... lightyears ahead of anything else out there. Visual Studio ... nothing comes even close.

Sure, there are lots of products that aren't the best (Source Safe) but what do you expect for the cheap price you're paying.

This is a fairly old thread but eh, what the hell

My own opinion is this: Microsoft should get out of the operating system business and stick to writing good (or at least acceptable) applications. I am a huge fan of open source software but I can admit that some of their software (the Office suite and Visual Studio in particular) are pretty impressive. Sure they have their quirks, many of which are likely more of the OS's fault, but they are at least as good as comparable OSS products. If I absolutely have to be on a Windows box, Visual Studio is by far my editor of choice - I even use it on occasion to write parts of OSS projects I may be working on (shh, don't tell :)).

Of course it's not all roses, Source Safe and Internet Explorer are both horrendously bad. Source Safe... let's not talk about. I had an 'incident' where Source Safe 'had it's way' with my code... Internet Explorer just makes designing web pages a major pain in the ass. There is all this wonderful stuff you can do with properly formatted HTML and CSS but half of it doesn't work because Microsoft hates standards compliance. And of course since IE is packaged with Windows, the vast majority of people use it meaning I have to spend 4 hours finding out that putting a non-breaking whitespace above a list of floated links with CSS hover attributes makes it all work

Without the defacto-standard of Windows on the average user's PC, Microsoft might actually have even better software. It's amazing what competition can do to improve a product. If IE was not the defacto web browser, they would have to compete and improve it in order to maintain sales. Just look what the surge in the popularity of Firefox has done: IE7 is supposed to a much more standards compliant browser, and implements things like tabbed-browsing which the rest of us have been enjoying for years. Before Firefox, the only improvement made on IE that I can think of was some minor improvement in PNG handling.

But please, Microsoft, stop making Windows - or at least fix it. A complete rewrite if necessary. The problems with Windows range from the stupid and annoying (rebooting after installing a program or updating non-kernel parts of the OS? why??), the frustrating and mind bending (the very tight integration of IE and DirectX into the core of the OS - DirectX install failed one time but reported completion, Windows and games did not work properly but Windows does not let you uninstall it and the installer just said it was already installed so I had to reinstall Windows), to the tragic (... Registry... and any major problems nearly always require complete format and reinstall of Windows).

I just look forward to the day when operating systems are interchangeable and I can happily run Office and Visual Studio from the comfort, safety, and sanity of my Linux box.

(rebooting after installing a program or updating non-kernel parts of the OS? why??),

This one is supposedly because of file locking issues that have existed since DOS. Vista is supposed to fix it. Not by fixing the way locking is done, but instead by adding a new system service that watches files and will update them when the lock goes away.@Taevin said:

the frustrating and mind bending (the very tight integration of IE and DirectX into the core of the OS

Yes. Microsoft seems to have the idea that their products never fail installation.@Taevin said:

to the tragic (... Registry... and any major problems nearly always require complete format and reinstall of Windows).

Oh, dear god. Let's not even get started on the registry. The unix way of 70-kajillion different file formats is bad, but at least it's human-editable in a disaster. I think OSX is getting this right. Plain-text, but structured.

I do admit to liking SQL server and Visual Studio. I can deal with the office suite's quirks, but generally don't have to. I hate dealing with IIS and IE with a passion. And cmd.exe. Thank god for cygwin and puttycyg.

I just look forward to the day when operating systems are interchangeable and I can happily run Office and Visual Studio from the comfort, safety, and sanity of my Linux box.

First, let me say one word: WINE. Second, let me say that even then I find this statement to be a bit of a WTF. I've been using X-windows based GUIs on *nix boxes for years, now, and I have yet to see a single version that comes close to the stability and usability of Windows, save one: OSX. Even then there are times when I prefer Windows XP.

Yes, *nix command line is, by far, infinetly more stable than Windows, but then again so is DOS. When you compare apples to apples (OSX pun fully intended), Windows XP beats every X-windows based GUI for look and feel, usability, and yes, stability, *EASILY*.

You really are getting what you pay for when you use Linux and Gnome or KDE.

(Insert redundant comment about how much of a WTF the forum software is...) It won't let me quote you Whiskey so use your imagination

Oh, no doubt. Wine has made a lot of progress and is invaluable when trying to run simple Windows applications. Cedega (previously WineX) is doing a great job on the DirectX implementation as well. However, I've never been successful at getting Office or Visual Studio to run well if at all using Wine. This is partly due to the fact that I have no interest in making any significant effort to solve that problem. Codeweavers has done a good job making Office work well with CrossOver Office but it's not really worth the money to me. I use office suite products so rarely that the minor deficiencies of OpenOffice do not hinder me. And of course there are more than enough development tools for Linux (KDevelop, or the old standby of Vi ).

I'm not denying that the overall quality of the Windows user interface is quite high. It's consistant and relatively easy to use. That being said, are you sure you have used one of the latest versions of KDE? Its user interface is also consistant and easy to use and can easily be configured to behave and look like Windows or OSX. I would consider them almost equal in UI quality (I must admit I would give the win to Windows; it just seems to be a tad bit... cleaner may be the right word), but when you add in the extra functionality (think KIO-slaves - I've yet to see anything in Windows remotely like them), KDE easily takes the cake. (I'm hearing good things about Gnome too, but I've never liked their UI design principles and I have an irrational hatred of GTK... kind of like Java...)

So I'm willing to give anyone who prefers the Windows GUI over a X-windows GUI a pass, but stability? Honestly, WindowsXP is by far the best consumer OS Microsoft has released in terms of quality and stability but it is still riddled with problems. As with many of the other problems with Windows, a large portion of the problem may be the poor yet tight integration. On my Linux box, if KDE crashes/freezes/whatever I can simply kill X with ctl+alt+backspace and kdm will restart KDE in seconds and I'm back to work (unless of course it was a kernel issue in which case I would be dead in the water but I've yet to have my Linux kernel die). On Windows on the other hand, if the GUI locks up or the kernel dies (whether directly or as a result of the myriad processes touching it) I am mostly screwed and my only recourse is a hard reboot. The one exception is if explorer dies and the OS is still responsive; fortunately WindowsXP allows you to kill and/or restart explorer.

I have quantitavely few problems arise with either Windows or Linux, they mostly differ in severity. When problems do pop up with my WindowsXP installation they tend to be system killers (like my previously mentioned examples of DirectX and the registry). The absolute worst I can see happening on my Linux system would be having to recompile my kernel (and I would be extremely curious to find out how it was able to be damaged in the first place) and typing 'cd /usr/src/linux && make && make modules_install install && shutdown -r now' takes a hell of a lot less time and effort than reinstalling Windows.

Anyways, my point is not that Windows and Microsoft are the evil abominations that some Linux fanbois like to believe. It's really more that those that deny the technical superiority of many (not all) aspects of a Linux-based operating system are no better than the former. And that I wish the best qualities of both operating systems could be combined to make a computing experience that was truly enjoyable on all levels.

At least you're not a zealot, but yes, stability. You say that you can restart X if it freezes. How often does that happen for you? For me, fairly regularly -- pretty much half the time when I'm using OOo or Firefox. Do you really consider that stable? I certainly do not. Compare to Windows XP, wherein a full freeze of the GUI or kernel is highly rare.

So you can restart X if it freezes, how is that different from restarting Windows XP if Windows XP freezes? Not a whole hell of a lot.

I agree that *nix as a kernel is very stable, but nothing built on X is. Nothing. Windows XP *far* outshines the steaming pile of dung that is X.

I won't disagree that XFree is a steaming pile of dung. XOrg is getting better, release by release, but I admit freely that things like fonts are sometimes downright painful to get working. I have two systems here with the same libraries and the same relevant sections of xorg.conf... yet one has good fonts and the other is barely readable. TDWTF is just the right place to talk about the current implementation of X.

But I still use X fairly often, even CVS, and rarely have crashes. I think the last one was about a year ago, and I was working on a patch for the linux kernel at that time. I pretty much expected a few crashes.

From a user standpoint, there is little difference between a kernel panic and X freezing. Something broke. From a developer standpoint, the latter is infinitely preferable to the former: I'm less likely to have corrupted data, if I know how, I can track the current state of the system and find out WHY it happened, and starting X takes less time than my entire computer. Furthermore, I might have applications still running, if I have multiple X servers or other processes, that are not interrupted. Most importantly, the gui crashing [maybe I'm remotely admin-ing the server] didn't bring down apache or the oracle server.

There are plenty of things to bash Windows about, but its UI isn't one of them. It's fairly consistant and generally easy-to-use, fonts look good, and it does what it does, out of the box, with little config. I won't say the gui is stable [I pretty regularly have it freeze completely], but it's not [BSOD every 3 minutes] either. KDE is doing well, but I still have font problems, some of the config options don't work as I'd expect, and it feels less responsive than my windows workstation I'm typing on now. I haven't touched gnome for some time because I don't like GTK, either.

Well if your X is freezing/crashing that much I can see why you would say that it is worse than Windows - and I would agree with you. While the rare occasion Windows dies completely, it's only a day of indescribable frustration of re-installing, restoring backups, and re-installing applications. X crashing constantly would cause nearly the same level of frustration every day. The only thing I can say to that is look at your version and configuration because X on my home desktop has crashed/frozen only about as many times as my WindowsXP installation has locked up (3-4 that I can think of). I guess for the purposes of an average user experience, there is little difference between rebooting for Windows and restarting X. Probably one of the only differences is time: it will take about 3-5 seconds to get back to my KDE login prompt whereas it will be 30-60 to get tot he Windows login prompt even on my beefy gaming system. That and KDE programs in general seem to be fairly good about restoring their previous states (of course Microsoft seems to do a good job on this with Office as well).

That said, I agree with TheDauthi on some of the X/KDE problems. Now that I think about it, the fonts in X are part of what makes it feel less 'clean' than Windows. You can of course change them but that seems prone to problems as well. The other thing that frustrates me is that it doesn't have great support for some screen resolutions. I have a 24'' widescreen monitor that supports 1920x1200 resolution but the highest X supports is 1600x1200. I've heard it's possible to get the full resolution but you have to play around with modelines or something equally time consuming But like TheDauthi said, XOrg is getting better all the time and hopefully in the near future it will be able to rival the power of the Windows UI.

If X kept freezing or crashing constantly on my machines, I would stop
using it. Fortunately, it works perfectly stable for me, with one
exception: If I play Doom3 or Quake4 on my notebook (ATI video
adapter), X freezes after one and a half hour or so. Personally I have
no problem with the fonts... Admitted, some of the fonts that came with
the distro are not beautiful... but an investment of 49 USD for a font
collection (e.g. this one) solves that once and forever.